Complete: Cadence Apartments Mural Project

In July, I placed the finishing touches on the four murals featuring my artwork at the new Cadence Apartments building in North Portland. For this project, ConAm Management Co. commissioned three large-format, hand-painted murals to be added to the interior and exteriors of their building. Additionally, they added a fourth vinyl installation to expand the length of the interior elevator vestibule windows.

You can read about more about this commission and see more detailed photos by visiting my Project Page.

Check out these time-lapse videos to see how the three murals came together!

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I teamed up with muralist Caleb Jay Maltsberger to transform my cityscape photomontages into hand-painted images. The work was incredibly slow and detailed as each image needed to be transferred onto the wall, traced, and painted with several layers of coats.

To complete this project, Caleb and I used almost every mural technique available: projection transfer, pouncing (an ancient technique that even Michelangelo used), graphite/chalk transfer, paper print outs for reference, stenciling…you name it. The sizes of brushes we used ranged dramatically from large to miniature. Even sharpies (for the initial trace) and various sizes acrylic markers where heavily used. We used such a large variety of materials to achieve the level of detail that would mimic the textures, lighting, and shading on each of the images.

Caleb’s expertise and experience as a detailed artist made him a perfect match for this project. Above, you can see the completed outdoor image of Watching over Portland, and below, Tower of Portland (left) and Portland Marquee Totem (right).

Three of the images are located on the interior’s elevator vestibule. Two are hand-painted renderings of my digital imagery and the third is a vinyl overlay covering the elevator’s windows. The vinyl overlay was complicated to materialize but simple to install. My image of Portland: East Meets West was transformed into five separate overlays that were carefully transferred over the elevator’s glass windows. They were applied using a special adhesive that saturated the image and then was wiped clean.

Below, the vestibule, completed:

Watching three of my digital images being transformed into illustrations has been an incredibly surreal experience. It was a great to get back to my roots of drawing and painting. So much time and effort goes into creating my digital imagery and I enjoy that the murals help demonstrate just how many little moments exist in each picture.

This was a totally fun project! I got to work with other people and experiment with other types of media. I really enjoyed working on a large-scale, multi-media project and I think the outcome came out really amazing.